Celebrating All Things Spooky: Chaos;Head

One of the visual novels I wanted to cover this October was Chaos;Child, after I heard it involves psychological horror. To be safe, I looked it up to double check that it’s fine to play Chaos;Child without playing the earlier, unlocalized Chaos;Head.

The general consensus was that you can, but it’s definitely not recommended.

So, yes. I bought a Japanese copy of Chaos;Head and used the fan translation in order to read it.

And… I’m glad I did!

Chaos;Head is a dark visual novel, much darker than Steins;Gate despite them belonging to the same series. The first few chapters in particular filled me with a great sense of paranoia and dread, and it has some of the most gruesome murders I’ve seen in any game.

The story follows a loner otaku named Takumi, who avoids people as much as possible, frequently suffers from delusions, and has felt an unknown gaze watching him ever since he was a child.

Now a twisted serial murder case has everyone’s attention in Shibuya, and Takumi finds himself caught up in it when an image showing the crime scene is sent to him a day before it happens.

I didn’t mind Takumi as a protagonist as much as some people do. While he’s certainly not the most noble character, I sympathized with his paranoia and extreme social anxiety.

Some of his delusions can be triggered by the player, when green and red indicators appear at the top of the screen at certain points in the story. Clicking the green one usually causes a positive or sexual delusion. Clicking the red one usually causes a horrific or cynical delusion. The line blurs a little as the game goes on, and there’s also the option of not clicking either delusion.

What I find even more interesting is its use of paranoia, though. Takumi is paranoid, there’s no doubt about it. Yet Chaos;Head piles up so many unsettling mysteries that the player becomes paranoid too.

There were points when I could clearly dismiss Takumi’s reactions as paranoia, but that just meant I felt I couldn’t necessarily trust him to be a reliable narrator any more than I could trust what other characters were saying. It does an excellent job of making the player mistrust everything and everyone.

Chaos;Head is a dark, fascinating story. The ending left me with several questions and a few apparent plot holes, but it sounds a lot is fixed by the updated re-released Chaos;Head Noah, which unfortunately doesn’t have a translation yet. I’m happy I read it, not just to improve my experience with Chaos;Child (and apparently Robotics;Notes also benefits from having read Chaos;Head), but because it’s a great visual novel in its own right.

Since Chaos;Head Noah is said to be a huge improvement, I look forward to the day when I can read that… although I can’t help but hope it will get an official translation someday.